Slashdot Mirror
Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power
Dupple writes in with news about a discovery that should extend the life of your battery in the near future. "Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals. The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you've noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that's why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day. It's currently a lab-bench technology, but if it proves itself in commercialization, which is expected to start in 2013—first targeting LTE base stations—the technology could slash base station energy use by half. Likewise, a chip-scale version of the technology, still in development, could double the battery life of smartphones."
Why do I not believe that 1% of global electrical production goes to powering wireless base stations.
It really is mostly the displays. On Android phones you can see what is using the battery, and it's almost always 60-70% the display.
As for those multicore CPUs, modern smartphone operating systems are remarkably good at keeping them clocked down when they're not needed. As a matter of fact, if I leave my Galaxy Nexus unattended (i.e. don't use the display), there hardly is any battery drain. I wouldn't be surprised if it would last a whole week that way.
My phone can go about 5 days if all I do is idle. That's with Bluetooth and 3G data services/sync turned on, but wifi radio turned off. If I nix Bluetooth and/or data services, I can increase that.
I'm all for reducing power consumption, but if it's not going to reduce the power consumption when the device is actually being used to transmit, then how is it going to increase battery life noticeably when most smartphone users plug it in every day anyway? Besides which, the screen is what eats up the lion's share of my battery... simply decreasing the brightness of the screen makes a huge difference in the life of the battery.